The natural habitat of E. coli is the gut, and the .beta.-glucuronidase activity of E. coli plays a specific and very important role in its natural history. The gut is a rich source of glucuronic acid compounds, providing a carbon source that can be efficiently exploited by E. coli. Glucuronide substrates are taken up by E. coli via a specific transporter, the glucuronide permease (U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,288,463 and 5,432,081) and cleaved by .beta.-glucuronidase. The glucuronic acid residue thus released is used as a carbon source.
In general, the aglycon component of the glucuronide substrate is not used by E. coli and passes back across the bacterial membrane into the gut to be reabsorbed into the bloodstream. This circulation of hydrophobic compounds resulting from the opposing processes of glucuronidation in the liver and deglucuronidation in the gut is termed enterohepatic circulation. This phenomenon is of great physiological importance because it means that, due in large part to the action of microbial .beta.-glucuronidase, many compounds including endogenous steroid hormones and exogenously administered drugs are not eliminated from the body all at once. Rather, the levels of these compounds in the bloodstream oscillate due to this circulatory process. This process is of great significance in determining pharmaceutical dosages, and indeed some drugs are specifically administered as the glucuronide conjugate, relying on the action of .beta.-glucuronidase to release the active aglycon (Draser and Hill, 1974).
.beta.-glucuronidase is encoded by the gusA locus of E. coli (Novel and Novel, Mol. Gen. Genet. 120: 319-335, 1973). gusA (GUS) is one member of an operon, consisting of three protein-encoding genes. The second gene, gusB (PER), encodes a specific permease for .beta.-glucuronides. The third gene, gusc (MOP), encodes an outer membrane protein of approximately 50 kDa that facilitates access of glucuronides to the permease located in the inner membrane. The principle repressor for the gus operon, gusR, maps immediately upstream of the operon.
.beta.-glucuronidase activity is not constitutively expressed in E. coli; rather, transcription of the operon is regulated by several factors. The primary mechanism of control is induction by glucuronide substrates. This regulation is due to the action of the product of the gusR (formerly uidR) gene which encodes the repressor. gusR was mapped by deletion mutation analysis to the same region of the chromosome as gusA, lying upstream of gusA. GusR repression of .beta.-glucuronidase activity has been shown by Northern analysis to be mediated by transcriptional regulation: RNA from uninduced cultures of E. coli does not hybridize to a gusA probe, in contrast to the strong hybridization observed to RNA extracted from cultures that had been induced with methyl .beta.-D-glucuronide (Jefferson, DNA Transformation of Caenorhabditis elegans: Development and Application of a New Gene Fusion System. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo., 1985). Presumably, therefore, GusR represses gusA transcription by binding to gusA operator sequences, thereby preventing transcription. This repression would then be relieved when a glucuronide substrate binds to the repressor and inactivates it.
The present invention provides gene and protein sequences of glucuronide repressors and use of the repressor for controlling gene expression and detecting glucuronides, while providing other related advantages.